[WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...

[kosebamse at gmx.net]

Matt Brown morven at gmail.com wrote Tue Nov 15 12:52:34 UTC 2005:

>> But we could start lifting the quality of the average article to where
>>it belongs, and we would have a chance to lift our reputation beyond the
>>"public toilet" image that has deservedly been bestowed upon us.

>You care too much about the public image, frankly.  You hear the
>complaints louder than the praise, and louder than the silent praise
>of all those people who, day after day, use Wikipedia for information.

I hear the complaints and the praise, but I also do a good amount of reading
Wikipedia (indeed, vastly more than writing), and that is another sobering
experience. I would not give a fart about the public opinion if I were
convinced of the quality of our work, but it is my own daily experience that
makes me far from convinced.

>Making the barriers to entry harder is a tempting thought, but among
>these newbies and dabblers are tomorrow's admins and writers.  A small
>proportion of them, granted, but making it harder decreases the flow
>of good people as well as bad people.

I am very well aware of that. My point is that we have long reached a size
where the task of cleaning up and bringing to encyclopedic standard even a
fraction of our articles is already monumental. We'd be well advised to
realize that this is more important than acquiring ever more megabytes of
content that creates more work than it adds encyclopedic knowledge. I am
overlooking nearly three years of Wikipedia's development now, and it is my
belief that among the newbies ( = tomorrow's potential admins) the ratio of
seriously interested users to vandals/trolls/low-potential-users has
declined to an unpleasant dimension. That's of course highly subjective. 

Furthermore, if we continue to grow exponentially (how long can we, BTW?),
we will not improve the average quality of our work, as several users have
rightly pointed out. In other words, we'll continue to expand an already
enormous body of mediocre writing. I can see no point in that.

>Yes, I'm an eventualist.  From my point of view, Wikipedia has a long,
>long way to go, and that's not a bad thing.  It's that the sum total
>of useful human knowledge is so vast.  There are many subject areas
>that Wikipedia's coverage is scant or wholly lacking.  Yet, at the
>same time, there are articles on Wikipedia that are better than ANY
>other online resource.  I am sure there are some that are better than
>ANY published article, on or offline.  Isn't that something to feel
>good about?

Yes it is, and it is one of the things that makes one stay despite all the
nuisances. Wikipedia has indeed a long way to go, and an essential
prerequisite to mastering it is to realize that we must work towards
quality, not quantity. 

What happended to the validation code, by the way? It's been discussed for
four? five? years now and few people seem to miss it. I can't understand
that.

Kosebamse

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